John Popper

He sort of took us under his wing and, like, showed us how to sell drinks and work a bar.

And he's got the studio out in New Mexico, and we just co-wrote.

And I got some friends of mine, and we co-wrote, and I learned about co-writing, where you write part of a song, part of the words.

Someone else writes all of the words, and you get to just pretend you're Billie Holiday and you're just the vocalist.

Right.

And it was a fun role to play, and I started really getting comfortable, and the best songs started rising.

Sometimes I wrote music.

Sometimes I didn't write music.

And that experience

It just sends you off on all these great ideas.

You start reacting off of new stuff.

And I took this idea to the band, and we went with people that weren't even friends of ours.

We went and got Ron Sexsmith.

He was a great, great singer-songwriter.

And we would come, and all of the Blues Traveler guys were such great musicians.

They would take someone's idea and run with it in incredible directions.

And having Kerry Rodriguez write a song, Alejandro Escobedo wrote one.

And Aaron Beavers, who is a friend of ours from this band Sherman, wrote some.

And the way we react with other co-writers, I think, is what made this a strong album.

And it also made the stuff that I do, it wasn't all over the record.